Power conductors

In BBC2’s Maestro, eight celebrities take charge of the BBC Concert Orchestra. And it proves a lot harder than they expected. Michael Deacon reports

Before she agreed to take part in Maestro – BBC2’s new talent contest, in which celebrities learn how to conduct an orchestra – the actress Jane Asher had occasionally wondered whether conductors were really all that important. Surely a decent orchestra could play just as well without one, she thought.

Then came Maestro’s first day of filming. Without having had any instruction beforehand, the celebrity contestants were put before the BBC Concert Orchestra, one at a time, and told to conduct them. Asher went first.

“It astonished me how difficult it was,” she says. “When you’re lying in the bath conducting away to a CD, you’re coming down on the same beats that they’re playing. But if you do that in front of a live orchestra, by the time you’ve heard them and you’ve come down on that beat, they’ve already played it. Which means that they’re not following you – you’re following them.” So, as Asher flailed away helplessly with her baton, the music got slower and slower, almost wheezing to a halt.

The other celebrities did just as badly, and for the same reason. To conduct an orchestra, they abruptly realised, you have to be able to hear the music in your head before it’s actually played. This competition was going to be a lot tougher than they’d thought.

Bad news for them, but music to the ears of the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, who is the chair of Maestro’s panel of judges. “The other conductor on the panel, Simone Young, and I were relieved when each competitor came out saying, ‘My God, that was hard!’,” he says, chuckling. “We’d hoped that they wouldn’t all find it so easy that people would wonder what we did for a living.”

Maestro’s contestants are a varied bunch, all of whom have enthusiasm for classical music but not very much experience of playing it. There are two pop stars: Alex James, who was the bassist in Blur, and Goldie, the drum ’n’ bass pioneer. Those two aside, the best qualified contestant is probably Asher – she learnt the piano and flute as a child, and her mother taught the oboe at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. (One of her pupils was The Beatles’ producer, George Martin. Which is not the family’s only link to the Fab Four – Jane dated Paul McCartney in the late Sixties.) The rest of the contestants are the newsreader Katie Derham, the comedian Sue Perkins, the actors Bradley Walsh and David Soul and the broadcaster Peter Snow.

Snow confesses to having no musical ability. But, as Maestro’s presenter Clive Anderson says drily, “He’s the right shape for a conductor, isn’t he? And I think his experience on the Swingometer [in the days when he presented the BBC’s General Election coverage] gives him some skills in waving his arms around – vital in a conductor.”

Indeed, Snow may prove to be Maestro’s star – even if it’s for reasons other than musical virtuosity. At a prepatory “boot camp”, the contestants were given classes in movement and rhythm. Asher conjures an irresistible image of the gangling, frowning Snow “having to convey the colour black through movement alone”.

The format of the programme is both simple and familiar. First we’ll see the contestants’ struggle to learn the basics; then, after each has had a shot at conducting, the judges and the members of the BBC Concert Orchestra will decide which contestant should be eliminated. By the final episode, two will remain; the votes of the public will decide who wins. The prize is the chance to perform at the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms.

Essentially it’s the pattern set by Strictly Come Dancing and other TV talent contests of recent years. Maestro’s producers are unlikely to win awards for originality. But Sir Roger Norrington promises that it will have a different tone to most other programmes of its kind.

“It’s a good-humoured programme, not one of those frightfully competitive things where the attitude is, ‘You’re terrible! Go away!’” he says.

He is clearly not an alumnus of the Simon Cowell school of judging. “We want to encourage the contestants,” says Sir Roger. “You don’t have to be horrible. Maybe the public want a Roman orgy but I would like to explain to the wider audience what is really needed [to be conductor].”

A conductor, he says, is like a cook: if you ask three cooks to prepare the same dish, the dishes will all taste different. Though it may not look to the layman as if a conductor is doing much, he or she is in control of tempo, phrasing (the loudness and softness of notes) and balance (which instruments are to the fore).

But, though Sir Roger insists that Maestro will be genially non-competitive, we may find that the contestants behave otherwise.

“Of course I would say that I’m a very humble little creature,” says Asher, “but if you asked anyone who knows me, they’d say I’m deeply competitive. When I agreed to do Maestro, I thought, ‘This’ll be a bit of fun, it doesn’t matter tuppence if I’m out after a week.’ But I mind dreadfully! It’s weird to find that out about yourself.”